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Justyna Bargielska is one of the most distinctive and original young poets writing in Polish today. She has published eight poetry collections, won the Rainer Maria Rilke poetry competition, and twice won the Gdynia Literary Prize. Gazeta Wyborcza recently predicted that she will be one ofthe favourites to win the Nobel Prize in 2040. Although her work has been translated into French, German, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Dutch, Russian and Czech, this is the first time that her poems have been collected in English.The Great Plan B introduces British readers to the work of a poet who examines, with forensic precision, the landscapes of quotidian existence, our disappointments and humiliations. Combining colloquial diction, philosophical enquiry and religious references, these poems are witty, tongue-in-cheek, both self-deprecating and macabre while death is increasingly present, implacable. You can never be entirely certain whether she is serious or joking.

For over thirty years Keith Armstrong has been taking his poetry to what John Donne called "the round earth's imagined corners" - giving poetry readings in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland, Iceland, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the United States, Jamaica, Kenya and Cuba. At the same time he has been exploring some of the imagined corners of his native North East of England, its sometimes heroic past and its post-industrial discontents.Imagined Corners brings together, for the first time, poems from all the corners of Keith Armstrong's imagination. It's a trumpet call to those who, in the words of John Donne, are the victims of:"war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,Despair, law."It is a manifesto for the public ownership of poetry. It's a hymn to a broken internationalism. And it's a beery love-poem for the North East."There are those who tell the terrible truth in all its loveliness. Keith Armstrong is one of them, a fine poet who refuses to turn his back on the wretched of the Earth. He is one of the best and I hope his voice will be heard more and more widely." - Adrian Mitchell"If you are old enough to remember Britain before it fell under the malicious spell of those who believe to catch a bus if you're over thirty is proof of failure, it will remind you of gentler, sweeter times... in place of the empty, near-manic, self-congratulatory but superficial and compensatory sensibility of modern culture, Armstrong gives us a sense of what we have lost, how we have gone wrong and reminds us of the dirt and darkness beneath the neon and glitz." - Penniless Press"rooted in the Tyneside music-hall tradition, closely behind which was the august balladry of the Borders... the authentic note of the Northern poet." - Michael Standen, Other Poetry"postcards from an alternative grand tour, journal entries from another, more innocent time, when the world spun more slowly and we had time to befriend strangers and notice things... celebrating people and places, a world of anecdote and adventure, strong drink and life itself." - Paul Summers, Dreamcatcher

Town-boy meets Square-boy. The inner-city meets the suburbs. Town is an exploration of the conflicting mentalities of the country and the city. It's a compelling tale of love, ambition and class. It's a study in English suburban misery and an indictment of a divisive education system. It's an epic poem about failure in loving, failure in living."courageous, exciting and challenging" - Adrian Mitchell"a dark work which unflinchingly confronts the threat to our essential humanity posed by the society in which we live. Dent's language crackles with the rugged energy of the Anglo-Saxon scop, his unrhymed and largely unpunctuated verse heavily alliterative, dense and powerful... In our sound-bite culture, it is refreshing to read such a passionate, committed, yet controlled epic." - Oz Hardwick, Aesthetica"brave, unflinching and true" - Fred Voss"the voice of the concerned man adrift a hostile world" - Jim Burns"subtle intelligence in every line... every word counts" - John Murray"risk-taking excitement, with a sense of verbal energy" - Alexis Lykiard

Tough is the bitter-sweet taste of urban romanticism, barbecued bear and the bright lights of Grangetown, from the biggest mouth on Teesside. Poet Andy Willoughby goes back to the estates where you have to be tough to survive. Sometimes he acts tough, sometimes he talks tough. Sometimes he is not so tough after all. Tough is his first full-length collection. If you don't like it - tough."...a poetical manifesto chronicling the hopes, fears, rituals, traditions and metamorphoses of a people proud of past achievements and apprehensive of future prospects, shot through with... wit, audacity and inventiveness." - Socialist Review"These poems often breathe a humility and tenderness that belies the title." - Dreamcatcher"Andy Willoughby is a power-house of creative energy, a renegade poet, a traveller, a performer, a ranter, a modern day shaman. His poems bring to life the hard-edged facts of life, loss and love; digging beneath the surface and drawing out the mythic and the epic qualities of everyday experience, to turn them on their heads." - Bob Beagrie"Andy Willoughby touches the political, and social, and with the precision of a surgeon flips it on its back, to expose the heartbeat inside. Poetry at its most honest, that fills you with a stillness and sadness at the intake of breath before every F word, at each microcosm carved of stone." - Angela Readman"Tough like meat. Not much gristle on these bones. Andy Willoughby is one of the meatiest poets I know, as loud on the page as on the stage." - Kevin Cadwallender

The Fourth Quarter deals with the ageing that comes to all of us. Memory fades and yet memories become more vivid. People and birds, seas and mountains, friends, children and grandchildren are so vibrant that we want to live among them for good, although we know we cannot. Bitter-sweet, comic and tragic, lyrical and elegiac, stoical and anguished, The Fourth Quarter rejoices in the giddy contradictions of nature and laments its deadlier necessities as David Craig tells stories of his own and others' lives."David Craig's poems are strong, clear-eyed, stripped for action. They give the lie to those who believe that to be a socialist is to abandon individual vision." - Adrian Mitchell"A general kind of Scots hard-edge and dryness. Dunbar must sound far-fetched; but that line of poetic blood." - John Fowles"In a culture obsessed by youth, it is heartening to encounter a poet who treats the nature of ageing... In his fourth quarter, Craig is a better poet than ever." — Penniless Press"Varied, scrupulously-crafted." — The South

Several Forms of Speech: New, Early, Escaped and Last Poems brings together poems written by the distinguished poet Arnold Rattenbury over a sixty year period. The earliest was published on the eve of D-Day; the last was written as part of the campaign to save the Community Hospital in Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, where Rattenbury lived. These poems are written in many different voices - public and private, personal and political, lyrical and satirical. Some are new, others are uncollected or from unfinished books. An extract from a verse-play rubs shoulders with a chapter from an unpublished verse novel. Idiosyncratic, technically brilliant and eloquent with passionate anger, Several Forms of Speech features a cast of painters and paintings, clowns and mummers, friends and foes. It's a book about art and love, empire and war, faith and community. And it is a reaffirmation of the necessity of Revolution.'Realistic poet whose gifts found expression in words, exhibition designs and friendship. A poet of distinction.'— John Lucas, the GuardianArnold Rattenbury was born in 1921 in China, where his parents were Methodist missionaries. After the Second World War he edited the radical magazines Our Time and Theatre Today, and worked full-time for the Communist Party before embarking on a career as an exhibition designer. He published seven books of poetry, Second Causes, Man Thinking, Dull Weather Dance, Morris Papers, The Frigger Makers, Living Here and Mr Dick's Kite. He died in April 2007, shortly after putting together

The Collected Poems of Tom WintringhamEdited by Hugh PurcellDrawing on the newly opened Tom Wintringham archive, this book contains nearly all Tom Wintringham's poems, many of which are published here for the first time. From the Great War and the October Revolution, via the General Strike to Spain and war against Hitler, Wintringham's poems are a unique record of those revolutionary years, a compelling cocktail of ideas and imagination, romance, realism and action.Tom Wintringham (1898-1949) was a man of action, a revolutionary, a soldier and a poet. During the First World War he served in the Royal Flying Corps; in the Spanish Civil War he commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigade; in the Second World War he was the driving force and inspiration behind the establishment of the Home Guard. He was a founder member of the Communist Party, and one of the twelve Communist leaders gaoled for 'sedition' in 1925. He edited the Worker's Weekly, helped launch the Daily Worker and was one of the first editors of Left Review. Expelled in 1938 from the Communist Party, Wintringham co-founded the Commonwealth Party and almost won a famous war-time by-election. His poetry was published in many magazines, and his numerous books included The Coming World War, Mutiny, English Captain, The Politics of Victory, People's War and the best-selling Your M.P."This book should be in all libraries." - The South"No one carried a greater charisma in those memorable days than Tom Wintringham. To my generation, his name re-creates a vision of beckoning symbols along the road to a New Jerusalem." - Geoffrey Goodman, Tribune"Wintringham spoke for his generation; he was a prophet who should have honour in his land." - Norman MacKenzie, GuardianHugh Purcell worked for many years as a producer for BBC radio and television. Credits include The Road to War and the BAFTA-winning American Civil War. His previous books include Fascism, The Spanish Civil War, Revolutionary War and a biography of Tom Wintringham, The Last English Revolutionary (2004). He is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a FRSA.

New and selected Poems by Chris SearleA selection of poems written during forty years of teaching in Britain, Africa and the Caribbean, celebrating language and education, cricket and revolution."He is that curious mix of guru, guerrilla and your favourite fast bowler." - A. SivanandanChris Searle was born in Romford in 1944. He has worked as a teacher in Canada, Tobago, East London, Mozambique, Grenada and Sheffield. His books include Classrooms of Resistance, Words Unchained, This New Season, We're Building the New School, The World in a Classroom, Grenada Morning and The Forsaken Lover (for which he was awarded the Martin Luther King Prize).Dismissed in 1971 from a teaching post in Stepney when he published a book of his pupils' poems, he was re-instated after his pupils went on strike in protest.His previous books of poetry include Mainland (1973), Red Earth (1980) and Common Ground (1983). He was recently a Visiting Professor at York University, Toronto. At present he works for the Yemeni Community Association in Sheffield, teaching veteran ex-steelworkers and asylum seekers. He is a keen cricketer and author of a book about the game, Pitch of Life. He writes a weekly jazz column for the Morning Star."At his best Searle's compassion, anger and sense of historical morality as a storyteller are reminiscent of the early Gorki. I can see no other writer in Britain with whom to compare him." - John Berger"Searle... writes with a passion; political anger infused into his writings to provide most of the poems with energy and drive." — Other Poetry"Searle's poetry is characterised by a passionate political drive as a celebration of revolution that scans the continents of the world. Lightning of Your Eyes balances the energy and strident desire for change with poignant and personal recollections. Through Searle's belief that by investing words with meaning, they become more than ink on the page, his poems themselves become vehicles for change." — The Institute of Race Relations

Winter Breaks is a no-frills week-end flight to the saddest hotel in the world. It's a grim Saga tour round the pleasures of old age, decrepitude and oblivion. Here you are only as cold as you feel. At the heart of the book is a cycle of poems based on Franz Schubert's Winterreise. Schubert's broken-hearted young man becomes a modern pensioned-off curmudgeon, an anti-romantic for our times. With one foot in the grave and the other in his mouth, the narrator faces loss and the certain expectation of loss with exasperation, anger and caustic irreverence. Gordon Hodgeon carefully picks his independent way across the frozen landscapes of the twenty-first century, glaciers of the heart, melting ice-caps of the spirit. Winter Breaks is a tribute to the nonconformist conscience, located somewhere between misanthropy and humanism, love and despair, mocking the world in which we live, bearing witness against false and unreliable gods. And when winter - like everything else - breaks down, the melting snows reveal the strength of tested values and convictions, the Horatian virtues of friendship, music, family, poetry, love and a determination to enjoy today - because tomorrow will surely be worse. "Gordon Hodgeon is a poet with a larger than usual appetite for the possibilities and complexities of English poetry." — Pete Morgan"In poems of family and friendship he turns over a northern upbringing and life with a most remarkable tact, lyric gift - and judgement, without ever being judgmental." — Glyn Hughes"Gordon Hodgeon reminds us that the voice of the curmudgeon can be grumpy, irreverent and ribald, but can also convey a sense of loss, fierce humour and gentle melancholy." — Cynthia Fuller

When the Metro is Free is an anthology of counter-cultural poetry from contemporary France, representing the work of a group of poets around Francis Combes and Le Temps des Cerises. These poets are the descendents of Apollinaire and Jacques Prevert, inheritors of the bohemian tradition of questioning everything, bearers of Marx's idea that nothing human can be alien to us. Although their approaches are radically different, they share the same existential charge, wrestling with the essential problem of modern life - the relationship of the individual to society. Francis Combes, founder of Le Temps des Cerises, France's most famous radical poetry publisher, draws on History to demystify the absolutes of contemporary ideology. Francoise Coulmin explores the narratives of historical female sensibility. The veteran Jacques Gaucheron recalls past conflicts and old comradeships. Gerard Noiret fuses the banal and the extraordinary. David Dumortier takes us on a sharp-witted, amusing trip through the underworld of the Metro. "It's refreshing to heart poets speaking directly… energetic and alert to their surroundings." — Ambit"A very interesting collection of intriguing, entertaining and sometimes challenging work." — Acumen"A well produced anthology, this offers a welcome chance to explore and assess the radical poetry of France under M. Sarkozy's watch." — Other Poetry"Alan Dent's translations are out to give you more than just a free ride on the metro; they're showing you that maybe it's dawned on French poets, words need to hauled back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.' — John Hartley Williams.Alan Dent was born in Preston in 1951. He still lives there and teaches modern languages in a local comprehensive school. He has published five books of poetry — Bedtime Story, Antidotes to Optimism, Corker, Who and Town. Since 1995 he has edited the radical literary magazine Penniless Press.

Psalm for DistributionLord,On 8th StreetBetween 6th Avenue and BroadwayIn Greenwich VillageThere are enough shoe storesWith enough shoesTo make me wonderWhere there are shoeless peopleOn the earth.Lord,You have to fire the Angelin charge of distribution.Seeds of Fire brings together the work of over fifty poets from the other USA - including Adrienne Rich, Fred Voss, Grace Paley, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez and Martín Espada. Lyrical, satirical, raging and prophetic, they bear witness against the forces of imperial slaughter, environmental catastrophe and social disintegration. They seek solidarity with the impoverished and war-torn working classes around the world, from Palestine and Iraq, Vietnam and Chile to the beggars on the streets of Washington.These poets sow their seeds of fire in the hope that the real globalisation project is the building of international unity among all those - including the ghosts of John Coltrane, Emmett Till, Tom McGrath, Rachel Corrie, Woody Guthrie, Emma Goldman, Tom Paine and the Blue Cat — who believe that a better world is still possible."If you have been feeling as helpless and frustrated and angry with global and national politics as I have, check it out."— Rain Taxi'Keep this wonderful volume in the car, or buy an extra copy for the waiting room of your favourite doctor'— Pete SeegerJon Andersen lives in New England with his wife, the poet Denise Abercrombie, and their two sons. He has worked as a farmhand, a warehouse worker, a gardener and in a lumberyard. He is presently a high school teacher. He is a recipient of The People Before Profits Poetry Prize and Partisan Press's Working People's Poetry Award. Curbstone Press published his first full-length collection, Stomp and Sing, in 2005.

It is the 1st of May, and we are among the 'fair field full of folk' gathered on Glasgow Green to celebrate May Day. On every side are Chartists and Suffragettes, trades unionists and Communists, tourists and film-crews, artists and asylum seekers, the homesick and the homeless, the long-time-dead and the yet-to-be-born. Helen Crawfurd and John Maclean are here, so are Edwin Muir, Ronald Stevenson and Edwin Morgan, Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Robeson and Nelson Mandela, Matt McGinn and St Mungo, a chorus of voices coming together in dialogue and potential unity in the Dear Green Place that is - or might be - Glasgow. Granny Albyn's Complaint is a love-letter to the city where David Betteridge has spent the best part of his life. Lyrical, narrative, satiric and reflective, his poetry celebrates the city's radical political and artistic traditions, in despair and hope, struggle and advance, continuity and loss, and all the lovely flarings-up of human achievement. Green thoughts in a red shade.'There is more to Socialism than a hatred of capitalism – though that is not a bad starting point. But love is more fundamental to the Socialist spirit than any other single factor. This is why I like very much this selection of poems by David Betteridge.'— Jimmy Reid (former UCS shop-steward)David Betteridge has worked as a teacher and teacher-trainer in Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Pakistan and Nepal. He has co-authored several books for the classroom. Granny Albyn's Complaint is his first book of poetry. He lives in Glasgow.

For Hugh Underhill, poetry is a constant struggle against distortion, a 'moving or breaking to sight' of the suppressed or denied and a sharing of delight in 'bright things' and in the goodness of the world. It's also an act of commitment, political and personal, against the world's disarray. His heroes are Bunyan, Blake, Bloomfield, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney. These poems are rooted in England but qualified by complicated feelings about place and belonging. They are shaped by the belief that a poem should be a made thing, an act of craftsmanship. And they are based upon the Nonconformist belief that living acquires meaning through commitment and choice. "Meticulously-crafted poems." — John Lucas

It is not Dances with Wolves by Stef Penney... but is Dances with Vowels by Kevin Cadwallender !Kevin Cadwallender was raised by a pack of vowels but found himself in a land of no sun, scant noons and jive cadets. Poetry came to him as a scrabble board of acne mists and algae guns. Escaping the polar hotels, he has since dwelt among larded nuns and in the seediest towns.Dances with Vowels brings together poems from twenty-three of the many small-press chapbooks Cadwallender has published since 1984, as well as from his three full-length collections of poetry: Public, Baz Uber Alles and Colouring in Guernica. Angry, funny and surreal, these poems explore the world of the underdog, the world of the crawling from beneath the boot, the world of turning over clouds to find the silver lining and scraping graffiti on its cumulus underbelly. Dances with Vowels has a heart that beats for its native North East. Lewd and clear. Poems that turn over clouds to find the silver lining.Exploring the world of the underdog – angry, funny, surreal.

Not Esperanto ! Desperanto is the universal language of despair !It is spoken by the hopeless, learned by the luckless and sung by the broken armies of losers, lovers and lefties everywhere. It is the literary language of the More or Less Deceived.With a bit of help from William Blake, Jake Thackray, Philip Larkin and Georges Perec, Mike Wilson offers a beginner's guide to the emotional grammar of Desperanto, where defeat is a regular verb, hope declines and the future is always conditional.Combining traditional form and formal experiment, playground wit and serious jokes, politics, people and poetry, Desperanto is a primer of crossed lines, crossed swords, cross words, crosswords and the c-word. It is a rough guide to the dialects of despair."Devastating and beautiful." — Adrian Mitchell (the shadow poet laureate)

Dark Room Elegies tells the story of Tina Modotti (1896-1942), the beautiful Hollywood silent-movie star who became a revolutionary photographer. Arriving in the United States from Italy when she was 16, she worked in sweat-shops and as an artist's model before becoming an actress. In Mexico City she immersed herself in bohemian and radical life, and appeared in several paintings by Diego Rivera. Later she travelled to Europe and the USSR. She helped organize Red Aid during the Spanish Civil War. This is a book about art and politics, love and revolution, idealism and power, from Hollywood and Mexico to Moscow and the battlefields of Spain."A gleam of genius."Allen Ginsberg

The Blue Cat is a courteous, well-read, outspoken, randy anarchist ready again to lay down one of his lives for what he believes. He's a cross between Top Cat, Puss in Boots, Schrödinger's Cat and the Cat in the Hat. He's a trickster, a prankster, an illusionist and an illusion. And he's back... The Blue Cat Walks the Earth is the third book in which Frank Reeve has let the Blue Cat out of the bag. He's a couple of years older, but he's still the actor he was. The only way he can get people to listen is to pretend he's not saying what he is saying. Of course, he's telling the truth. But you don't have to believe him. Nine lives out of ten, the truth is unbelievable.This book comes with a CD of Frank Reeve reading these new poems, accompanied by Don Davis on sax and Joe Deleault on piano.

Welcome to the Pleasure Dome. Pavilion is a celebration of the world of the English dandy, its gorgeous peacock feathers and fading glamour. Her cast of eccentric characters live somewhere on the coast of Greeneland, between the Brighton Pavilion and the ruined West Pier. They entertain their listeners at the bar, revealing the sad secrets behind the peep-shows and arcades, cheap thrills and expensive mistakes.Deborah Tyler-Bennett's previous books include Clark Gable in Mansfield and Take Five (2003). She lives in Loughborough.

My Life in Squares is an introduction to the work of a major European poet and one of the most original writers to emerge in recent years from the 'new Europe'.Kristin Dimitrova's work has been published in 22 countries, translated into 19 languages and won many international prizes. She is a Balkan minimalist, a feminist-fabulist whose work combines the fantastic and the prosaic. She writes with a deceptively simple, playful touch, teasing the reader with faux folk-wisdom and unexpected endings. Oblique, subtle and witty, her poems creep up on her subjects from behind, demonstrating that looking at something sideways is not the same as avoiding the issue.Kristin Dimitrova was born in Sofia in 1963. Her books of poetry published in Bulgaria include Jacob's Thirteenth Child (1992), Closed Figures (1998), Faces with Twisted Tongues (1998) and The Cardplayer's Morning (2008). She has published a book of short-stories, Love and Death under the Crooked Pear Tree (2004) and a novel, Sabazuis (2007). A five-times winner of national poetry awards in Bulgaria, Dimitrova has also translated John Donne's poetry into Bulgarian. She teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Sofia. My Life in Squares is her first full collection in English.

Poetry on the history of utopia, revolution and hope, introduced by Booker Prize-winning author John Berger."Communism," wrote Brecht, "is the simple idea so hard to achieve." Common Cause tells the hard story of this simple idea, from the Garden of Eden to the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Common Cause is a 'history of the defeated', a book about enthusiasm and illusion, heroes and martyrs, saints and sinners. It is an epic, a tragedy and a manifesto for the utopian imagination. Translated by Alan Dent.The French poet Francis Combes has published fifteen books of poetry, including La Fabrique du Bonheur, Cause Commune, Le Carnet Bleu de Chine and La Clef du Monde est dans l'Entrée à Gauche. He has translated several poets into French, including Heine, Brecht, Mayakovsky and Attila Joszef. He has also published two novels and, with his wife Patricia Latour, Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre. He is a founder of the radical publishing cooperative, Le Temps des Cerises, and was for many years responsible for putting poems on the Paris Metro.Alan Dent is a poet, translator and critic. He edits the radical cultural journal Penniless Press. His anthology of contemporary French counter-cultural poetry, When the Metro is Free, is published by Smokestack.

The Jewish-Hungarian poet András Mezei (1930-2008) survived the Holocaust as well as the three-month siege of Budapest. His life was inevitably shaped by these events. Throughout his long writing career, he returned repeatedly to the terrible experiences of his childhood, assembling a poetic collage of eye-witness accounts of racist mass murder. Christmas in Auschwitz brings together, for the first time in English, all of Mezei's most important poems about the Hungarian Holocaust."A many-sided and accomplished Hungarian writer and poet."The IndependentAndrás Mezei, a locksmith by trade, was one of the most prominent writers in Communist Hungary. A poet, novelist and essayist, he wrote the script of Lucky Daniel, one of the first Hungarian films to critically examine the events of 1956. In the 1990s he launched the Belvárosi Könyvkiadó publishing house and the cultural journal Central European Times. He was a recipient of the Hungarian János Arany Prize and the Israeli Kotzetnik Prize. He died in his native Budapest in 2008.Thomas Ország-Land is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent based in Eastern Europe. He is also a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and the 1944-45 siege of Budapest.

Chris Kinsey is one of our finest Nature Poets. In 2008 she won the BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year competition. But as the poems in Swarf reveal, Chris Kinsey is also interested in human nature, especially among those whose lives are easily overlooked and undervalued – many of these poems draw on her experiences working with the elderly, with excluded students and adults with learning disabilities.Swarf is a book about life in a small town, its mad Fridays, slow Sundays and long afternoons in the pub. It is a book of poems about living and learning, about hospitals, park-life, martial arts and greyhounds.Chris Kinsey is a freelance writer, tutor, and rescuer of greyhounds. Her previous books are Kung Fu Lullabies (2004) and Cure for a Crooked Smile (2009), both published by Ragged Raven Press. Her stage play, Feathering the Dark, was shown at Aberystwyth Arts Centre and her short play, I and I, at Venue Cymru. She writes a regular Nature Diary for Cambria and was runner-up in Natur Cymru's 2010 'Inspired by Nature' competition. She has read at the Ledbury and Hay festivals, and her work has been featured on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Wales. She is a member of Academi, Powys Arts Forum and the board of Ty Newydd, The National Writing Centre for Wales. She lives in mid-Wales.

"There are only a handful of poets on this planet who can write political, intelligent, uncompromising poetry that is still relevant and accessible. Gustavo Pereira is one such poet."Benjamin Zephaniah"In this remarkable book, Gustavo Pereira reflects with insight and eloquence the reawakening in Venezuela that offers us all the threat of a good example."John PilgerThis edition features the poems of Gustavo Pereira in English for the very first time, presented alongside their original Spanish versions.Gustavo Pereira is one of Latin America's most prolific poets, the best-known Venezuelan poet of his generation, a leading spirit in his country's Bolivarian revolution and a prominent supporter of President Hugo Chávez (who once invited him to serve as Minister of Culture). Pereira has written over 30 books exploring Venezuela's Spanish, Indian and revolutionary traditions. In 2008 the Caracas World Poetry Festival was dedicated to Pereira. A member of the Venezuelan National Constituent Assembly, he is the author of the preamble to the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, which defines culture as a legal right.

Raiment is a book about the ways in which we clothe our bodies, and our spirits. It is a study in faith and disappointment, bras, knickers and the whole armour of God.According to the popular Easter hymn, "Angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away, / Kept the folded grave clothes where thy body lay". For Marilyn Longstaff, the cerements in the vacant tomb are a symbol of spiritual mystery and an image of religious emptiness. She is a pilgrim, a stranger in a strange land, tempted by the guilty pleasures of the flesh and beset by a Puritan's consciousness of sin and injustice. These are poems about the flesh and the spirit, cheerfully balancing desire and loss, hope and failure and finding satisfaction in small pleasures, in a world that contains no angels in bright raiment.Marilyn Longstaff's previous books are Puritan Games (2001) and Sitting Among the Hoppers (2004). In 2003 she received a New Writing North Promise Award, and in 2005 completed her MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She is published in a range of magazines and anthologies. She is a member of the Vane Women collective, and has recently been part of the group Stemistry, working with the poet Lisa Matthews to write in response to stem cell research. She lives in Darlington.

Alice in Wonderland meets David Brent: exploring the humdrum of 9-5 office work.These days most of us earn our daily bread sweating over spreadsheets, agendas and unanswered e-mails. There are 10 million office-workers in the UK, sharing over 200 million square metres of office space. And yet office work has rarely been the subject of poetry. Graham Fulton writes with wit and compassion of the world of e-mails, post-its, tea-breaks and sickies, of the little rituals, the red tape and the flexi hours, punctuated by moments of mayhem."Here's a poet who explores the world with wit, irony and intelligence..."David CrystalGraham Fulton has been writing poetry since the 1980s when he co-founded the influential Itinerant Poets performance and publishing group. His poetry has been published in the likes of The Rialto, Other Poetry, Poetry Scotland and The North, as well as in the anthologies Scotlands (Carcanet, 2004) and Scottish Poems (Macmillan, 2007). He now runs Controlled Explosion Press. His previous collections include Humouring the Iron Bar Man, This, Knights of the Lower Floors, Ritual Soup and Other Liquids, Inner Circle and Pocket Fugues (2009). He lives in Paisley.

Angel in Flames brings together, for the first time, the best of James Scully's poetry. The works featured begin in the 1960s – when it was claimed that Vietnamese villages had to be destroyed to be saved – and continue on to the 21st-century terror wars fought not on battlefields but against civilian populations. There are two angels in this book. One is Walter Benjamin's Angel of History; the other is an unemployed and illiterate Puerto Rican man. Both angels are blown backwards into a future they cannot face. Scully's poetry addresses head-on the intellectual and cultural degradation of an imperial order whose ambition appears to be to reduce the globe to a shrunken head on a stick.James Scully was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1937. In the 1960s he was heavily involved in the anti-war movement in the USA. In 1973-74 he and his family lived in Chile; after the military coup their Santiago apartment was used as a safe house by the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria. He has published ten books of poetry, as well as translations of Aeschylus and of Quechua poetry from Bolivia. His other books include Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice, Vagabond Flags and, with Bob Bagg, The Complete Plays of Sophocles. He lives in Vermont with his wife.

His Hands Were Gentle brings together, for the first time in both Spanish and English, the best of Víctor Jara's lyrics, from early songs like 'El arado' ('The Plow') to 'Estadio Chile' ('In the Stadium'), written in the hours before his execution. With a Preface by the actress and screenwriter Emma Thompson. Click on Extracts above to read the Preface in full, for free."For me, Victor was everything an activist-musician should be." Emma Thompson "As long as we sing his songs, as long as his courage can inspire us to greater courage, Víctor Jara will never die." Pete Seeger, American folk-singer Víctor Jara (1932-73) was a legendary Chilean singer, songwriter, guitarist and theatre director. A leader of the New Song Movement, in the aftermath of the military coup of 1973, Jara was arrested, imprisoned and executed. Martín Espada has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including the poetry collection Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas (Smokestack, 2008).

Owen Gallagher's third collection of poems is a book about the warring tribes to which we all belong. This is a journey to dystopia: from the Gorbals in the 1950s to contemporary Palestine. The poems here examine the loyalties of family and friendship, the sectarian and ideological loyalties of religion, class and politics.Along the way we meet Emma Goldman, Trotsky and Shelley, and are shown glimpses of a distant worker's republic – where Robert Owen cocktails are served on the beach every evening, and parliamentary debates are conducted in verse."Owen Gallagher's poems should be more well known." Moniza AlviOwen Gallagher was born in 1949 in Glasgow of Irish parents. His two previous collections are Sat Guru Snowman and A Good Enough Love. Until recently he worked as a teacher in Southall. He lives in London.